The Last Man: Apocalypse Without Millennium

Abstract

Abstract Early in 1826 appeared a book advertised as a “new Romance, or, rather Prophetic Tale”s—Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man. It was published at just the wrong time. Since 1823 the literary world had been preoccupied with a controversy about just who had invented the Last Man, beginning with the publication of Thomas Campbell’s poem “The Last Man” and Francis Jeffrey’s suggestion in The Edinburgh Review that Campbell was indebted to Byron’s “Darkness” for the idea. Campbell was moved to print an open letter to Jeffrey asserting his own priority and claiming that it was he who at least fifteen years before had suggested to Byron the subject of “a being witnessing the extinction of his species and of the creation, and of his looking, under the fading eye of nature, at desolate cities, ships floating with the dead.” According to Campbell, the publication of “Darkness” had discouraged him from pursuing the theme, but “I was provoked to change my mind, when my friend Barry Cornwall informed me that an acquaintance of his intended to write a long poem entitled the Last Man.”